“Obvious, except for the one line,” I say. “The one about something not being necessary a few years ago, that throws me off.”

Sybil returns the letter to her folder. Above, the hawk wheels, though I’m not sure if it’s the same hawk I saw earlier.

“I researched that, too. Abortions were legal in most states until the 1890s. That’s when the moralists took over gynecology and passed the laws against it. But a lot of doctors continued to perform them.”

“So, then it was still going on? After Lockwood came back from Florida, they picked up again where they left off? And whatever she had been using failed? But you said awhile back that Cyrus wanted, what was it? Five kids? That was his goal? So why would she—If this not-quite-incest with Lockwood was still going on, and she got pregnant, why not do what she’d done before? Have the baby and let Cyrus think it was his?”

“She might have had complications with the pregnancy. Elizabeth was pushing forty. Might have been something else. The timing. Cyrus was fifty-six, and fifty-six then wasn’t like fifty-six now.”

“Oh.”

“Gertrude would have known who to go to. But I don’t think Elizabeth would have told even her dear, dear friend who the other man was. She might not have told her there had been another man.”

“So she, your great-grandmother, somehow or other arranged to see Lockwood when he was in New York?”

“I don’t know. Hard to think of how she could have. Maybe he made secret trips to Boston, and she sneaked out of the house when Cyrus was off in Gloucester or somewhere else. I don’t know. Like I said, I don’t even know if it continued between them. This part gets real fuzzy.”

“You don’t know, Sybil, you don’t really know if there ever was anything in the first place. And you haven’t explained this—if there was something, how did Cyrus find out?”

“You’re right,” she says. “I haven’t explained.”

But now she tries.…

Cyrus’s Testimony

The only plausible way for him to have found out would have been to hear it from Lockwood or Elizabeth herself, and Lockwood seems by far the more likely of the two. Sybil’s imagination fails, it cannot show her what emotions had been felt by a man cuckolding his own father, a father he must have respected, if not loved, and yet resented at the same time, though he had no right to that resentment. And piled atop the resentment, the blocked affections that must have tormented him whenever he saw them, the sons of the father’s son, his, his. My God, having to look upon them, even if it was only for a day or two, once a year at most, and all the while have to stifle what was in his heart and feign and dissemble, must have split him in two.